


The Tide

by spaceOdementia



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997), Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: Acceptance, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Death, Drama, Endless Summer 2020, F/M, Grief, Love is a color, Reunion, Romance, Slightly spiritual, Supernatural - Freeform, The lifestream is a funky place, The lifestream is heaven, coming to terms, mild existentialism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:21:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25273840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceOdementia/pseuds/spaceOdementia
Summary: What happens when you die? You continue where you left off.(or, in which Zack and Aerith are reunited in death)
Relationships: Aerith Gainsborough/Zack Fair, Zack Fair/Aerith Gainsborough
Comments: 24
Kudos: 43





	1. i.

**Author's Note:**

> It is Cloti/Zerith Endless Summer 2020 week, and I am super excited about it! I've written a few things, and this is one of them. I actually wrote this several weeks ago, but I figured it could fit underneath the Day 1 prompt: "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" by Starship. 
> 
> Happy reading! All thoughts, comments, ideas, love, hate are welcome and adored.

_Have you ever longed for a place you didn’t know?_

He had asked her this, once, when they sat together underneath the stars in the playground of Sector 5. It was just another night out of so many they had spent there, sitting atop one of the rounded, plastic mountains meant for kids half their age.

It had been such a wondrous question, his voice filled with curiosity and his face lined with thought. 

At the time, she had merely looked at him, examining the curve of his brow. She hadn’t quite grasped the question. She’d never longed for a place—she’d only ever longed for other things, like the experiences she would never know. What would it feel like to be _normal?_ How would it feel to hear silence instead of Gaia’s song, singing in her ear? Would flowers still have meaning to her? Would she wonder about the deep, matured depth of roses, or the kind vibrance of pansies? At that moment, Aerith had not felt that longing in years, because what was the point in longing for something you would never have? She had decided that that kind of daydreaming was a waste of time. 

_No, I don’t think I have,_ she answered him. 

Aerith sits in her garden, now, on the ridge overlooking her home and the pond. She knows the exact moment she felt Zack depart. 

It was the afternoon of an autumn day, and she was bringing back a basket of picked flowers from the garden. She was thinking about the vase she was going to put them in, and how pretty it was going to look as a new centerpiece on their dining table—the future visitors and guests they were going to have would love it. The space would brighten. The entrance would gleam with welcome.

As she set the flowers on the table, it had been a flicker. Like a wispy cloud rushing across the sun. A wing of a bird shadowing the window as it flew by. A blink, half a second, a piece of a moment.

How is it, she thinks, that a soul leaving the world can be as insignificant as the bending of a flame on a wick? A breeze sighing against a leaf? One flicker across the surface of the world?

She had stumbled against the table. The flowers fluttered to the floor in a spray of violets, blues, and whites.

How is it that one moment can change someone’s whole life, when several years can equate to nothing? How can a death mean so much to a mere few and mean nothing to everyone else?

At first, Aerith didn’t know what it meant. It felt like a stomachache, a sudden pulverizing rush to her gut, gripping her with its clawed fingers and shredding her intestines. She had laughingly thought she ate something foul.

In a minute, the feeling disappeared, and she was left feeling empty and light, as if a part of her had been voided, like a burden had been erased.

She didn’t know until later, when she had been waiting—waiting and waiting and waiting—when she realized the world had told her something she had already known long before.

It was too good to last. Too beautiful to survive the vast rot of the earth. Too bright and bold, eating up all the air like a giant flame. Too…

Too anything. Zack was _too—_ too much, too loud, too colorful. He was a garden, blooming and iridescent against the light of dawn.

Aerith stares at the ripples in the pond below, the dragonflies dipping and skimming the surface and creating waves, beginning so small and becoming so massive by the time they hit the bank. 

She plucks one of the flowers beside her, delicately breaking the stem from its root. She twists it and turns it between her thumb and forefinger, feeling the dampness of the break coat her fingertips. 

The view is different. It feels different. The texture is not as it once was, and the sight from the ledge is withered and dull. The sunny greens are roughened and blunt. The peppered yellows, reds, blues, whites are smudged together, becoming speckles of murky brown. It is hard to love this place, suddenly, as if it has admitted to its betrayal with a smile.

Aerith knows about the cycle of life and death better than anyone. She knows the take and the give, the sacrifice required to feed the earth, and the spin of the world that continues on and on like a boulder falling down a steep hill. It never stops. The first breath of life is someone’s last. The flower in her hands will shrivel and crumble to replenish the soil, allowing for others to take its place. 

The understanding of the world shadows across her belly like a shiver. It makes her anger and her grief consuming. Overwhelming. It eats her like a banquet. She feels the whispers as they brush against the shell of her ear, taunting her, telling her it was all going to pass the same way, so why is she so sad?

She hates them. The whispers. The ghosts. Their apathetic insights. The piercingly pragmatic way they are allowed to see the cycle of life. 

She hates them all. 

She tears the petals off the flower, and she places her palms over her ears to shield them from the voices, but she _can’t_ because they seep through her skin, worm into her mind, tangle in the gyri of her brain. 

_He’s gone._

Again and again and again. 

_He’s gone. A drop in the Lifestream. A broken rock from a cliff. A soul encapsulated in the dirt._

“Have you ever longed for a place you didn’t know?” 

Aerith gasps, taking her hands away from her ears. She glances wildly around the space, realizing the sun is setting, the violet light eclipsing the horizon in a ghastly, glowing halo. She realizes she is crying, and she gasps once more, and she can’t breathe. No one is here, and why is she so surprised when _he’s gone?_

Her heart crashes in her throat. She knows, now, what he was telling her. What he meant. 

She longs for that place, that place she’s never been to, the place that must exist, beneath her feet, above her atmosphere. Wherever it is. 

Wherever he is. 


	2. ii.

Zack lies in a rushing stream. It isn’t wet or cold or warm. Sensations are a mortal figment and magnificent imaginings. It is a choice, here. You can feel, if you want. You can fly. You can breathe. You can hear your heart beat inside the drum of your chest but only and always if you _want._

For Zack, right now, in the very moment he had woken up and realized he had crossed the gate into eternity—infinity—the so-called beyond—he had felt _too much_. He felt everything. All at once, he felt all the singular emotions he’s had in his life. It compounded into him like punches, bashing into his skull as if someone was ramming him into the ground.

In the moment after, he thought, _enough._ He hit the switch without knowing he could. Everything turned off. The lights went out. Darkness enshrouded him, and finally, he was alone.

Because that’s what happens when you die. The only belongings you bring with you are the memories of things you left behind.

He’s never been negative. He’s always been optimistic. Annoyingly so, he knows. He heard it enough, had garnered enough sighs and eye rolls to conclude, yes, he had an obnoxiously bright outlook on life, even with failure and disappointment and grief. Yet, being here in the after, he wants what he’s never needed. He wants to quiet himself. To experience _nothing._ Because if he can experience _nothing,_ that will mean nothing happened. He is dreaming, that’s all. A deep, deep dream in a deep, deep nothing. So that’s what he does. He dreams of things.

He dreams of his childhood. He dreams of his mother and father, and how they watched him with exasperation as he climbed a tree so tall, he got stuck in the thinning limbs overhead, panicking that he’d never feel the ground again.

He dreams of the time he went swimming in the crater lake in Gongaga, his mother watching him from the bank, his father spreading out the picnic blanket and food from the basket. Them calling him and him answering stubbornly, _ten more minutes!_

He dreams of his dream. To become strong. To become the SOLDIER he knew he had to be. _I’m going to make you both so proud of me._ His mother crying. His father clapping him on the shoulder and bringing him into a crushing hug. _I’ll write to you all the time. I’ll visit when I can._

He dreams of his first day, grinning at everyone with his excitement spilling over him and onto his entire squadron, and being yelled at for grinning because _grinning like that will make you a target._

Him not caring. Him grinning through his entire training, regardless.

Then he dreams of falling. He dreams of the day he fell through the roof of the church into the flowers that cushioned him and bruised him all the same.

_I have twenty-three tiny wishes._

Zack has always wanted to ask her about each and every one of those wishes. At the time of it written on her note, it didn’t matter, because he had been so enamored. All he cared about was the next thing she had written—

_I’d like to spend more time with you._

That’s what he begins to think about. Twenty-three wishes. Why twenty-three? Why not twenty-four? Why not three? Why not one? He wishes he had asked her. He wishes he had thought to ask her.

The letters, too. Why eighty-nine letters? He goes on thinking. Why not ninety? Why any letters at all? She wrote to no one, because there was no one to read them.

As Zack lies in the wetness that is not wet, he looks up to the deep blue sky that is not the sky—isn’t it the color of his eyes? It must be, with the tinge of green from the mako—he wonders when this place will tilt and spin. He wonders when he’ll fall back into the endless blue eyes of this place and into the world he departed, into the church and the arms he left too soon, into the _I didn’t read your letters, not one, and I’m very sorry about that._

He waits for the fates to change, to break off the cliff of this everafter and back to the mundane—because what’s more magical than transforming a beast of the dead into the human of living?

When Zack opens his eyes next—had he been sleeping? Can you sleep here? _If you want,_ it tells him. _Always if you want._

When he opens his eyes, the sky is no longer blue. It is green and gold. The green of a garden—of a blanket of grass in a field underneath the bright, shining glare of the sunlight in the afternoon. It’s the kind of green you can run your fingers through, soft and plush and luscious as it fills the space of your palm and the indentations of your skin. It lingers afterwards with a prickly itch, scolding you for daring to leave it.

Zack wants to fall into this sky, now. _I want it. Why can’t I have it?_

All that he receives is a sharper vision, and a deeper clarity of the color above him, or around him, because he’s not in a river anymore, he’s not outside, he’s merely there, in a place with no walls to enclose him and no ground to hold him. He doesn’t breathe because he doesn’t want air in his lungs, and he doesn’t sweat because there is no such thing as temperature. He merely wants that apathetic tingle, the craving to feel something yet the restraint to pull it back, because if he feels it again—the everything, the _too much_ —he thinks he may die again, somehow and someway. And what happens if you die after you’re already dead? Are you gone for good? One blink, and are you erased from all the memories of the ones still alive?

He watches the green shift, shadowed with black flecks, and the golden bordering the edges like a tease. It is a gorgeous mixture, and he decides this must be his favorite color with all its swirling and spinning, cratered and expansive depths. The colors are as vivid as they are transparent, like distant galaxies unknown and unexplored.

He thinks he might stay here forever, and what if this is his life, now? Swimming in the essence of green, of spring, and never leaving? What might that be like?

Not so bad, he thinks. Suddenly, he realizes that this place won’t be so bad if it consists of such pungent color, reawakening the sparkling memories in the leftover luggage in his mind, in the rumpled past clothing and the dusty scenes of childhood. It’s not as lonely. It’s not as terrible if he can touch this color, and if he can remember the expression of it entrapped in eyes so beautiful they swallowed his heart, and if he can feel the warmth from it that used to flood his bones.

Zack feels the bell reverberate against his chest—that annoying, ever-present optimism, clawing at all the apathy he’s let himself swim in. He begins to feel the river caress his skin—briefly, a mere whisper across his cheeks.

Zack doesn’t grin, but he smiles.

It’s not so bad at all.


	3. iii.

Zack doesn’t wait as long as he thinks he’s supposed to.

How quickly does time move, here? He wonders this in between his bouts of consciousness. Does time exist at all? It must be a broken fabric, because there is no sun or moon, no distant ticking, no true light or darkness—just a rift and a shimmer, like he’s trapped in a glassy bubble. He’s alone, but somehow he’s not lonely, and while Zack has always been a voraciously social creature, this instance of solitude has not troubled him.

The peace of death, he thinks. Nonexistent time, feeling how you want when you want, being wrapped up in the color of love.

So when Zack opens his eyes, he’s surprised at hearing the sound. It ripples across the green and gold that surrounds him like vibrations. All of it waves around, rushing like the tides and receding back. His old self would have panicked, because the color is washing away. The vibrancy is fading like it has been bleached by sunlight.

Nothing in him stirs. He knows what is happening immediately, like a deep knowledge full of instinct and surety.

The sound is like a knock. Knuckles rapping against the wooden entryway to the door of his bubble. _Knock, knock._

“Hello?”

The tremulous tone of that word holds the _everything_ in it. It holds every emotion she’s ever felt—Zack knows, because that’s what he felt when he arrived, too.

He’s standing, his feet steady on the nothingness underneath him. There is no true door—no true gate—no symbol of arriving. There is only the vast, unending sky that is not a sky surrounding him.

When she appears, it is as if she has fallen out of that sky. She is pink and red—a buzz of sugar, the hint of candy, and the redolent tang of spring.

She is in front of him. How long has he been waiting? Not long enough, he supposes. He didn’t have to wait like she did, and as much as he tried not to _want_ her to arrive—because arriving meant her soul was unattached to the living, because the unfathomable happened to her, because she had to feel the fear and the hopelessness and the pain of death—he still _wanted_ her. This place knows all of you. There is no hiding. Even with the apathetic cloaking and ignoring the prickling rush of feeling, it knows.

The switch inside of him flickers up, and the rush evolves from a prickle into a thorn, a thorn into a bushel of stinging nettle, of brambles, a deluge of spikes. It bashes his heart and his lungs, transforming them into a thousand pieces, eroding him into a pile of mud and sludge and the soil he had helped her with in her garden.

_She decided to wear pink._ It’s his first thought. _She’s wearing the ribbon I bought her. There is a gaping hole in her stomach._

Her mode of death fades almost as soon as she looks at him. It is an extraneous detail now that she’s here, because the only thing…the only thing…

Can you cry in death? Zack guesses you can if you want, but he doesn’t want to, and yet here he is, feeling his tears warm and wet and full fall down his cheeks. They begin floating away from him like stars, burning brightly and vanishing.

He walks forward—or flies—or teleports—in front of her, and he wraps her up in his arms—and he’s astounded by the touch. It is the ram of a bulldozer. It is a shockwave of a supernova. Zack loses the breath he doesn’t need, and Aerith gasps in his ear. Her arms come around him, and this is heaven, then, isn’t it?

“I felt you leave me,” she chokes.

“I didn’t mean to,” he says. “I was on my way to you.”

“I wrote you letters.”

“Yes. Eighty-nine letters. Why eighty-nine?” he finally asks, his voice thick and flooded. It doesn’t sound like him.

“Twice a month until you died,” she whispers, and she tucks him closer and closer until they fuse together. It’s a burn, like their skin is melting wax. They stick together, and Zack _wants_ this, wants it and never wants to let it go ever again.

“Do you know how much I love you?” The words paint his throat with smoke and rubber, because he’s burning up with it, burning and burning and burning— “Do you know how much?”

She shakes and trembles. She is magic. She is a Cetra, an Ancient, so far above him, and yet she holds him like a gift.

“Oh,” she gasps. “I love you, too. I never stopped. I wanted to—I wanted to move on from you so badly—“

“I wouldn’t hold it against you if you did.”

“Zack—“

His name coming from her mouth is a pleasure, tenfold. His lungs fill up with air he doesn’t need, and his heart beats with blood he doesn’t have.

“I’m sorry I made you wait. I’m sorry you wrote me so many letters I couldn’t read.”

“Zack, it’s—“

They are blending together, now, and he’s not sure where he ends and where she begins.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there to save you. I’m sorry you died so soon.”

She shakes her head, and she pulls back just enough to look at him. Her eyes are so much better than what surrounded him before—miles and miles and miles better. It had never been a competition, though this place certainly tried to prove otherwise.

“It is how it was always supposed to be,” she says. “Life is a series of different paths. The world has always whispered about fate, but fate only reaches so far. We choose our paths.” She palms his cheek, and he places his hand over hers. “And I’m not a princess to be coddled, Zack Fair. I didn’t need anyone to save me.”

Four years is a long time. He can see it, now. She’s heartier, her bones more robust. She is stronger than that girl in the white dress who was afraid of the sky, who held her basket of flowers proudly for the world to see.

“You’ve always been my path,” he says. “Can I still coddle you? Can you still be a princess to me?”

She thinks about it—acts like she thinks about it—and bumps her forehead against his, her nose brushing his nose, their breaths eclipsing like warm shadows.

“Only to you,” she says, and she leans forward to kiss him.

If their touch is a supernova, their kiss is the beginning of a new world.

When they break away, he stares at her, and she stares back. She smiles at him, and she is part of him forever.

What happens if you die when you’re already dead?

Right then, Zack knows the answer. He grins.

You’re reborn.

**Author's Note:**

> The actual songs that inspired this for anyone interested:  
> A Place I Don't Know by Daniel Olsen, Jonathan Eng  
> ANAHOLA by KUNZITE


End file.
